lamp-posts. Sometimes they played two-handed poker,
for Marice not only sympathized but shared with Druro his passion for
cards. Perhaps this drew their hearts as well as their heads together.
At any rate, to lookers-on they seemed absorbed in one another.

Mrs. Hading essayed skilfully and very winningly to draw Gay into her
intimate circle, and it vexed her to realize how she evaded her plans.
Berlie, she had already subjugated and made a tool of; but Gay stood
aloof and would not be beguiled. While perfectly courteous to Mrs.
Hading and whole-heartedly admiring her beauty, she had yet distrusted
and disliked her from the first. Now her dislike deepened, for she saw
that the widow was harming Druro. She kept him from his work, and
sympathized and pandered to the passions that already too greatly
obsessed him. There were always cocktails and cards on the table
before them. Druro was drawing closer round him the net of his
weaknesses from which Gay had so longed to drag him forth. Between the
latter and Lundi Druro there now existed a kind of armed peace which
appeared to be based, on his side, in indifference, and, on hers, in
pride. There was often open antagonism in their eyes as they faced
each other. She despised him for lingering and lagging at the heels of
pleasure, and he knew it. Sometimes, when he was not actively angry
with her, he thought she had grown older and sadder in a short while,
and wondered if she were having trouble about young Derry, who was
up-country, or whether old Derek was going the pace more than usual at
home. It must be these secret troubles, he thought, that had suddenly
changed her from the laughing girl he knew into a rather beautiful but
cold woman. Cold, yes, cold as the east wind! Sometimes her clear
eyes chilled him like the air of a certain little cold hour of the dawn
that he very much dreaded; it was a relief to turn away from them to
the warm and subtle scents and frondlike ways of Marice Hading.

For weeks now, he had divided his time so carefully between Mrs. Hading
and poker at the club, that there was nothing at all left for the
Leopard mine. His partner, M. R. Guthrie, commonly known as "Emma,"
sometimes came from the mine to look for him, pedalling moodily into
Wankeloon a bicycle, and always pedalling away more moodily than he
came. He was a shrivelled-up American with a biting tongue, and the
only man in the country from whom Druro would take back talk.